Steve Li to be released today, following Feinstein’s private bill

Steve “Shing Ma” Li is being released from jail today, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer informed his lawyer this afternoon.

Li’s lawyer Sin Yen Ling said she called a deportation officer at about 1 p.m. and was told the 20-year-old City College of San Francisco student would be released from the detention center in Florence, Ariz. He spent a six weeks in custody there.

The good news for Li and thousands of his supporters comes hours after California Sen. Dianne Feinstein introduced a private bill seeking to block his deportation to Peru.

“It’s clearly, definitely because of the introduction of the bill today,” Ling said. “I wasn’t expecting it would happen so quickly but it’s a result of Feinstein’s private bill.”

Ling said she does not know what time Li will be released, but is currently scrambling to make arrangements for him to ride home to San Francisco on a Greyhound bus.

“He’s going to be subject to a supervisor release program where he’s going to have to check in with ICE,” she said. “That would not on an electronic ankle bracelet, it’s a different program than his mom and dad,” who await deportation to China.

Feinstein, D-Calif., filed the private bill four days after Li’s originally scheduled flight back to Peru, where he was born. Feinstein asked immigration officials earlier this week to put the deportation on hold while she considered whether to introduce the bill.

“I decided to introduce a private bill on Steve’s behalf because I believe his removal would be unjust before the Senate gets a chance to vote on the DREAM Act,” Feinstein said in a statement.

The DREAM Act, which failed to pass in Congress in September, would grant undocumented immigrant children citizenship if they entered the United States before age 15 and were attending college.

Feinstein said the act will be brought to the floor again in December. She hopes Congress will pass it before the end of this year.

“This important legislation would allow youngsters such as Steve Li to continue making a contribution to the United States, the country that they grew up in and call home,” Feinstein said in the statement.

Private bills are often last resorts in immigration cases. Only a small fraction of them get through Congress, but simply introducing a bill puts a deportation on hold.

Li’s lawyer, Sin Yen Ling, said she had been submitting requested documents on his case to Feinstein’s office all week.

“Nothing was guaranteed whatsoever, so we’re really ecstatic at the fact that Feinstein’s office did finally decide to introduce this bill,” Ling said.

Li’s case has attracted attention because he says he has no friends or family in Peru. His parents were born in China but moved to Peru in the 1980s to escape the government’s one-child policy. They brought Li to the United States when he was 11.

The three were arrested in San Francisco on Sept. 15 because they were allowed to stay in the United States only through 2002. Li’s parents were released and wear electronic ankle bracelets as they await deportation to China, but their son was sent to a detention center in Florence, Ariz., on Oct. 8.

In the last month, students across California and Facebook users have written letters, called and rallied to ask Feinstein, Sen. Barbara Boxer and Speaker Nancy Pelosi to intervene.